Michael Carusi reached out to initiate a super cool project, one of my favourites to date; A KTM 520 flat track bike. The connection came from a good friend Nigel Petrie (Engineered to Slide), who built a titanium exhaust for Michael’s last project; a KTM 500cc flat track bike (shown below).
Michael Carusi’s ‘Project Flat Track’ , Image: Andrew Jones from Machines That Dream
Naturally I followed along with this whole build, Michael collaborated with quite a few companies/people to make this bike truly one of a kind (@projectflattrack).
I got in contact with Michael when he put up a post looking for someone to do some modelling/rendering. I really threw myself into the deep end taking on this project – but I learnt a lot from it. I’d never done a rendering project requiring such high detail.
Michael sent through some ideas and inspiration pictures and I went to work.
If you aren’t familiar with how meshing works, it’s an amalgamation of points in space that are all connected by lines. These lines are filled in to create faces. Many connected faces make up the surface you see in the renders. The mesh construction of the fuel tank is shown below.
This project took a lot of time and a lot of that was spent learning new modelling and rendering techniques.
The most enjoyable parts to create were the FMF exhaust and the Hoosier flat track tyres.
After every iteration of changes you can see the model develop, and after every step you’ll always find something else to improve on.
Some of the final renders are shown below:
Thanks Michael for the opportunity to work on this project, I can’t wait to see how this build turns out!
Turning Moment 